to make a long story (with lots of ranting and cursing) short: i'm frustrated with my job. job is stressful. i've felt behind for months now. i keep being told that it's a matter of prioritizing, but it seems like no matter what i'm working on, there's someone asking me why i'm not working on something else. this would be ok, or at least a challenge i was willing to meet, if it weren't for the overall negative vibe of the place. i naively thought that as long as the negativity wasn't directed at me, i'd be fine. but i can't deal with my stress effectively while trying to tune out mr. boss calling mrs. boss useless and incompetent. let me rephrase that: i can deal with it, but i don't want to. i don't like what it's doing to me. so i've started looking around for something else. i can't afford to be without a job or make less than i'm making now, so i'm sure it'll be a long process. in the meantime, i'm trying to concentrate on the parts of my job that are so ridiculous they're funny.
mr. boss's mother is the owner of the company - the big boss. big boss is a smart woman who seems fairly business savvy, but her day to day involvement in the company is mainly relegated to managing the finances and listening (not terribly sympathetically) to mrs. boss cry about how awful mr. boss is being to her on that particular day. predictably, she has developed CEO Syndrome. this occurs when the business person is so far removed from the daily operations of the company that their presence is nearly irrelevant. this usually manifests itself in the micromanaging of relatively insignificant procedures which the CEO has arbitrarily deemed a high priority. example: once a month, the company buys bagels for the staff. last month, things were really hectic and the bagels were overlooked. frankly, i doubt any of us would have had time to eat a bagel that day even if it had been placed in our hand. but thanks to CEO Syndrome, my co-worker & i were lambasted for not having a proper procedure in place...a bagel procedure.
big boss's other pet project is the monthly calendar. the calendar shows holidays, payday and the employees' days off. fine. perfect. helpful. but it's not enough to have the calendar posted on the bulletin board. the board must then be decorated with seasonally appropriate pictures. this has become one of my jobs. for each month, we have a manilla envelope filled with cheesy clipart and if the calendar is not up & decorated by the 2nd, i will get no end of shit for it. yes, the entire project takes 10 minutes maximum. but combine that with the aforementioned stress and unceasing work flow and you can see why i might resent being dragged away from my long to-do list to staple snowflakes to a corkboard. i borrowed one of the pictures from the January envelope because it was just so ridiculous.
this picture is indicative of so many things...Jiminy Cricket, a doozer, Franklin Sherman as Baby 37 (i tried so hard to find a picture of that)...but more than any of those, it looks like the demon spawn of Ralph Wiggum and the leprechaun who tells him to burn things. observe:
although you wouldn't know it from my tone, company mandated clipart and procedures for bagels are the absurd parts of my job that i do manage to find humor in. and since i'll be stuck at this dysfunctional place a while longer, i need to appreciate those anomalies. otherwise, it's just too depressing.
the upside is that my deficient professional life has pushed me to make great strides to improve my real life. i joined the Chapel Hill Philharmonia and next week i'll be playing my first orchestra concert in six years. yay me!
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